Health

In the fight against Methamphetamine won’t we need is openness not secrecy. What is more ridiuclous is a quick google search establish that the details of this sportsman have already been published and yet a court now wants to retrospectively cover things up.

According to Judge Harvey that is a-ok by the law. In combatrting drugs and drug use secrecy isn’t going to help.

A Bay of Plenty sportsman who collapsed and died after using methamphetamine and cannabis during a training session has had his identity concealed by the courts.

At an inquest into the man’s death in Tauranga yesterday, Coroner Wallace Bain suppressed the name of the deceased, as well as any significant identifying details, following a request from the man’s family.

The court heard how the man collapsed while resting during a heavy training session, which followed him smoking about five puffs of methamphetamine – also known as P – from a pipe and consuming cannabis head mixed with tobacco.

The amount of cannabis consumed was described as being three times larger than the usual cones of cannabis, being the size of a “compacted jaffa lolly.”

After collapsing, the man began convulsing, with the seizures lasting for three to four minutes.

Well that’s nice of the coroner but the horse bolted weeks ago. We know that he was a sportsman, we know he used methamphetamine and we know he is dead. Quite why this is now suppressed is beyond belief.

It’s almost like the judiciary were holding their collective breathes to see what Judge Harvey would do and now he has delivered the smacking normal dispensing of secrecy has resumed.

Low income New Zealand families would have to spend up to a third of their income to eat healthily, a researcher says.

A separate study reveals about 40 per cent of New Zealand households go hungry, skip meals or scrimp on ingredients because they are not “food secure”.

Food security is a key topic for discussion at a national dietitians conference in Dunedin that started yesterday and runs until tomorrow.

Professor John Coveney, associate dean at South Australia’s Flinders University, said yesterday people in low socio-economic groups were more likely to have a diet-related disease such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.

His Australian research, which will be presented at the conference, showed low income families would have to spend up to one-third of their weekly income on buying a shopping basket of healthy food.

In comparison, a “healthy food basket” cost just 9 per cent of income for high income families.

A low income family would normally spend about 18 per cent of its income on food.

Riiiight, and the cost to buy some seeds/vege plants and maintain a vege garden is?

I remember when I lived in Wellington, Mrs Whale and I went to a fellow teachers house for a bbq. It was a fricken nightmare, because this little dweeb, and I do mean a dweeb, was right into his Global Warming scare-mongering.

I, of course, made his and the other drop-kick teachers miserable by pointing out, as he toured us around the house he had just finished building “environmentally”.

• Concrete pad – He had no idea how cement was made.
• The Garage – no cars they were evil, but he forgot the bike was made of steel (you need carbon to make steel), the aluminium (bauxite doesn’t lie around waiting to be picked up), the Chrome mudguards (same as bauxite), the electro-plating (lead, acids, and cyanides), the synthetic rubber hand grips and tires (real bummer how they make that shit)
• The Kauri Front Door, that was ok I was told because it was Fijian Kauri…oh right their trees don’t matter as much as ours.
• and so on…it was quite fun educating stupid green wankers.

I, of course, don’t give a flying fuck where anything comes from or where it goes afterwards. The earths resources were given to us to use until exhaustion.

Now this is where this story is supposed to go. As is usual for green fools they “like” to wipe their arses on that brown, untreated, fucking sandpaper they call toilet paper. WRONG, just WRONG. I have always known it was wrong. everyone was sniggering after a visit to the bog. That was taking environmentalism just way to far.

Finally I have proof just how wrong it is. There are apparently serious health risks from using cheap skid paper.

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I am staggered, even when me and my mates were selling phone systems we never did a deal as spectacularly good for the sales person and bad for the customer as the “deal” that Telecom has been extorting from the DHBs.

Telecom is scrambling to offer health providers alternatives to its beleaguered XT network as a third district health board confirms it is considering dropping its contract.

The Dominion Post reported yesterday that Hutt Valley and Capital & Coast district health boards had asked to switch to another network, saying the problems with XT were putting patients at risk if on-call doctors could not be contacted.

Capital & Coast would not say how much its 341-phone contract is worth, but Hutt Valley’s 49-phone contract is more than $1 million.

Fuck me dead, that is astounding! I was trying to figure it out, even over five years it’s still an average phone bill of $340 per month.

If I was Tony Ryall I would seriously, seriously be looking very closely at the rorting that Telecom is conducting inside the health Sector. Another area worth rattling the cage over is the exorbitant costs associated with the Health Intranet. When you have got the officials bullshit explanation as to why THI is so expensive, give me a call and I’ll translate it for you.

There are literally millions to be saved just in communications.

Tony “Wardrobe” Ryall continues to perform well in health. He is doing so well he may soon be nudging Crusher Collins off the lead in the WOBH Minister of the Month Award.

Mr Ryall now wants mergers to “bulk up” PHOs and reduce the $33 million a year the state spends on their management fees.

So Tony reckons we can give a lot of bureaucrats the arse and be better off for it. A sure vote winner that Labour will say is hurting NZ by reducing the state services capacity or something equally dumb.

Some interpret the changes as a PHO take-over by doctors and a downgrading of community input. But Mr Ryall said he wanted doctors, nurses and other health workers to take a stronger role in the leadership of health services because that made the services more effective and efficient.

“Most people in the country wouldn’t know a PHO if they fell over it. This plan of strong community engagement is probably more of a myth.”

Yeah what is a PHO anyway? Pretty Hopeless organisation? Ryall is right, most people want to see a doctor, not a PHO, and community involvement requires a community to be interested, which they arent. All the left’s hand wringing about community involvement is never going to do them any good, because the only people that believe it are the other socialists they drink their chardonnay with.

It is nice to see a Labour Party apparatchik making the case for user pays. Who would have thought it would have been a former Clark staffer too.

Alfred E. Hipkins blogs about his recent health experience. Apart for his forlorn search for a cream to cure his Gingervitis he basically is saying lift the cap, user pays and save health dollars…and he is absolutely right.  There are numerous medications that would benefit from this, one being Elidel, which my daughter uses for Eczema, isn’t subsidised and requires a doctors prescription to obtain making it even more expensive.

Unfortunately for Alfred E. Hipkins, even though Elidel is expensive and effective against eczema it is no cure for Gingervitis.

The MoH is taking an ostrich approach to the ongoing computer outage at Waikato DHB.  My sources tell me that the systems are still down and that staff are looking at having to have 3000 PC’s to be re-imaged by Jan 5th I reckon.

So here we go, round two of the nothing-to-see-here nobody-is-to-blamefest at the Waikato DHB.

In the latest installment they’ve brought in the big guns (and by this I mean kinda more like the sawn off air rifle that was in stuff.co.nz last week rather than anything useful or impressive).   Alan Hesketh, he of the MOH debacle this time last year is now involved and letting the media know it’s under control and just one of those things.  He’s kinda like the IT version of Santa, showing up every Christmas and dispensing get out of jail free cards to all involved.

The first of his gems is:

“Alan Hesketh, the Health Ministry’s deputy director general of health information directorate, said the virus attack was believed to have been random, and part of the ongoing appearance of “Malware” (malicious software) in the digital world”

It’s a crazy bad digital world we live in, I get it.  His statement contains some truth, there ARE malicious bad things out there and they ARE randomly and specifically trying to get in through the chimney and rampage through your shit.  However that’s why we actually have things such as firewalls, antivirus software and regular patching of software.  The maintenance, administration and regular updating and checking of these are responsibilities that those in IT are burdened with in order to minimise this risk.  If you do your job properly you may still get hit, but it is a lot less likely and at least you will deserve the salary you get paid.

What occurred at MOH and again here at WDHB is a failure of these processes, these are not zero day attacks with brand new security exploits, these are incidents involving malicious software for which patches and antivirus files have existed for a very long time.  It equates to not wearing a seatbelt and then blaming your injuries in a nose to tail accident on there being a lot of cars out there.  What Mr Hesketh and the CIO at the WDHB seem to be glossing over and ignoring  is that basic precautions were not taken and a DHB is now operating at 10% efficiency for the Christmas period. But hey it’s not busy around this time is it?

I really feel for the operations staff having to spend Christmas cleaning up this mess.  It’s not a simple process to remove and when it is, it likely leaves a Swiss cheese mess of Windows so that conficker and it’s ilk can get back in very easily.  Realistically the majority of infected PC’s will need to be wiped, reimaged and patched.  That’s a few hours work right there.

“Although the Waikato DHB had successfully defended against these attacks in its usual day-to-day operation, its IT system was undergoing an extensive upgrade when the virus got in.”

An IT environment is not an immune system, work in one area will not weaken the framework of another.   I can say that in my entire career that I’ve never done any form of systems upgrade that removed the threat protection from the rest of the network, either before, during or after said upgrade.  If he is saying that this is a mitigating reason then  he really needs to be a bit more forthcoming on what on earth were they upgrading for this to make sense.    Currently there’s nothing in the DHB’s strategic project list for IT that would validate this statement.   As it stands it’s yet another bunch of misleading gibberish.

“Although all health boards’ computer systems were connected, there were no reports of the Conficker virus attacking other IT systems.”

Fancy that, perhaps because they are diligent in their responsibilities or even if lax, paid attention to the MOH disaster and take relevant precautions.  If there is a high five to be given it’s to the WAN Administrators of the other DHB’s who obviously put an effective lockdown on all links between them and the WDHB in a timely manner.

The numpty Alan Hesketh needs an education into how to properly engage in Social Media and blogging and to stop telling lies when numerous people can prove him wrong on so many things. How about you start coming clean on what a complete cock-up the systems are at Waikato DHB.

I have received some correspondence about a massive snow job at Waikato DHB. On Thursday NZPA reported that a major computer virus outbreak had essentially shutdown all of the DHB’s 3000 plus computers. On Friday it was  reported that the DHB was now restarting all their PC’s after the incident, so far I haven’t heard how it all went.

My correspondent is a Senior IT person and is livid at what has gone on. The explanations given by spokes people at the DHB are laughable in the face of even basic knowledge of major IT systems. Anyway here is their take on issue, I couldn’t have written it better myself and I think a few judicious OIA requests may go in after the dust settles.

The word from those in the know is that Tony Ryall is a Minister with a very firm grip on his portfolio.

He recently chopped Labour flunky Ken Douglas from his Health Board appointments and the news today is that Tony Ryall is still swinging the axe against other Labour political appointments.

All I can say about that is keep chopping Tony, keep chopping and can you provide a quick “How To” sheet for the other timid members of the cabinet on how to get rid of pinkos on government boards.

I think the only way that Crusher Collins is going to beat out Tony Ryall for Politician of the year is actually have a car crushed before Christmas or have Phillip Field in a Container Cell.

While I was investigating the waste of Te Reo Marama in the area of Maori Public Health I came across a disturbing example of how people are troughing and also endangering people at the same time.

On 30 July there was a Regional Cluster Hui at Nga Tai E Rua Marae in Tuakau about Health issues.

One of the speakers was Damian Peters. He had a session entitled Neuro Linguistic Programming and it was a session that suggested that NLP could be used to to assist in helping Maori stop smoking. Here in lies just one of the problems.

Wikipedia describes Neuro Linguistic programming as;

Because of the absence of any firm empirical evidence supporting its sometimes extravagant claims, NLP has had little or no support from the scientific community. It continues to make no impact on mainstream academic psychology, and only limited impact on mainstream psychotherapy and counselling. However, it has some influence among private psychotherapists, including hypnotherapists, to the extent that they claim to be trained in NLP and apply it to their work. It has had an influence in management training, life coaching, and the self-help industry.

For those of you who are struggling to understand what NLP is think of it as something akin to touching your middle finger to your thumb on both hands and reciting Oooooohm, I can stop smoking, over and over again, and thus you will be cured of your filthy habit. It is pure bunkum, yet we seem to be funding people to attend Hui, presumably from the public purse, to listen to witch-doctors espouse discredited theories. As a case in point watch this video.

Speaking of witch-doctors, Damian Peters, the person running the Magic Ohhhhhm session has a few problems of his own.

Wellington, Sept 8 NZPA – A counsellor who developed sexual relationships with female clients is a serious risk to the New Zealand public, says Deputy Health and Disabilities Commissioner Tania Thomas.

In a report issued today following an investigation, Ms Thomas identified Damian Peters, who she said showed a total lack of insight into his actions.

Mr Peters had caused harm to another under the guise of being a professional counsellor, which was unacceptable, she said.

“To provide false information during this investigation is to shirk responsibility for one’s actions.

“To refuse to comply with lawful instructions is true arrogance,” Ms Thomas said.

Mr Peters had neither set nor maintained professional boundaries when he counselled a client, identified as Ms A, from August 2004 to August 2006, Ms Thomas said.

“Instead he gradually blurred the boundary between their therapeutic and personal relationship to the point where counselling sessions in his professional office were followed by sexual intercourse.

“Mr Peters’ knowledge that Ms A was a vulnerable client — having suffered sexual abuse in the past — compounds the seriousness of his behaviour.”

It wasn’t the first time Mr Peters had been before the Health and Disabilities Commissioner (HDC) over a sexual relationship with a client.

There certainly needs to be some sort of quality control and investigation in the area of Maori Health Providers from the masses of evidence that I am uncovering.